


Home on the Range

by leonidaslion



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Drama, Gen, apocofic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-23
Updated: 2011-01-23
Packaged: 2017-10-15 00:42:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/155293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leonidaslion/pseuds/leonidaslion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: cowboys, home</p>
            </blockquote>





	Home on the Range

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mtee](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=mtee).



When Dean imagined the end of the world, this really wasn’t how he pictured it. There were supposed to be fireballs raining down from the sky and boiling seas and demons clawing their way up from the earth wherever you turned.

Instead, there had been about three seconds of an unbearable, high-pitched noise and that was it: the end of everything.

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t as simple as that. Maybe it took the world months to die properly. Maybe there was rioting in the streets as people began to realize that nothing with more than a couple of moving parts worked right anymore, and maybe some jackass started a fire in Boston and burned the whole city to the ground. Maybe there was starvation as food ran out and no new supplies came. Maybe there was disease.

Maybe it was the four fucking horsemen come at once, yippe-kay-yay-aying like a bunch of redneck cowboys as they bent the entire world over and screwed it until it couldn’t walk straight.

“Stop it,” Sam said abruptly.

Dean glanced over at his brother with one raised eyebrow. “Stop what?”

“Thinking about it,” Sam answered, and then patted Halen on the neck as the horse let out a restless whinny. “There isn’t anything either of us could have done.”

Dean knew that. He did. After all, it wasn’t like Dad had trained them for this kind of crap. He’d taught them to watch the shadows for trouble and, as far as anyone Dean had spoken with knew, the Pulse had been a human act of terrorism rather than a demonic one.

Not that those sons of bitches weren’t taking advantage of the opportunity.

There were more of them than ever now, it seemed: more of everything that had ever hidden in the dark and wasn’t much bothering with either anymore. Humanity’s weakest hour and all the goblins and the ghouls were coming out to play. Goddamned clusterfuck, was what it was.

“I hate coming here,” Dean grumbled. “’S a fucking graveyard.” His horse caught the edge of his nerves _(or maybe she didn’t like this any more than Dean did)_ and tossed her head as she took a few steps backwards. “Easy, girl,” Dean murmured, resting a steadying hand on the side of her neck. “Easy there, Impala.”

Fuck, but he hated that name. When the Harrisons had given them the horses two years ago, Dean had given both animals respectable names. Then Sam had gone behind his back and started calling the black mare ‘Impala’ and now it was the only thing the dumb animal would answer to. As if Dean wanted to be reminded of his baby: useless and rusting away almost five hundred miles to the east.

Impala snorted and tossed her head again. She didn’t move back any further, not with Dean’s knees sending her a message to stand where she was, but Dean could see the rolled white of her eye and there was a fine sheen of sweat on her glossy coat. And Impala might not be the brightest crayon in the box, but she wasn’t a coward.

Frowning, Dean said, “Something’s got her spooked.”

“Yeah, _you_ ,” Sam replied with a wry twist of his mouth. “You know they pick up on what you’re feeling, man.”

Dean’s frown deepened into a full on scowl. “Dude, how many freaking times do I have to tell you I’m not the horse whisperer?”

“Missouri said—”

“Oh, fuck her too,” Dean grumbled, and then urged Impala forward with a light press of his knees. Just because he got on with the horses _(and the dogs, and the chickens, and even the fucking rabbits, nosey bastards)_ it didn’t mean anything. No matter what some wanna be Sylvia Browne said. Some people were just good with animals, was all.

He didn’t know how Missouri even found them, anyway. The woman had just showed up in their path one day halfway between the Aaronson Ranch and Kate’s place, bicycle leaning up against a tree and lunch for three laid out on a checkered picnic blanket. Sugar cubes for the horses.

It was Sam’s fault, most likely. The kid was probably sending out some kind of lame psychic beacon.

“You’re going to have to accept it at some point,” Sam said now as Halen followed Impala forward. “We need every advantage we can get these days, Dean. You can’t keep blocking it out.”

“Sure I can,” Dean shot back, craning his neck to look at the blind, dark faces of the buildings around them. “Cause there’s nothing to ‘block out’.”

Sam muttered some kind of response, but Dean was too distracted by the way his skin was trying to crawl off his body to pay any attention. They’d already had this argument about a hundred times anyway.

Impala had stopped, responding to a signal he didn’t remember giving, and Dean wasn’t at all inclined to get her moving again. As he scanned the ruined street, his breath came quicker and his heart pounded in his chest. Late autumn in Omaha, the wind cold on his face, and Dean was slick with sweat.

Fuck.

“Something’s wrong,” he said.

This time, Sam gave him a more serious look. “Are the horses picking something up?” he asked, nudging Halen closer.

Dean sort of wanted to smack Sam for his continual attempts to get Dean to admit to something that wasn’t there, but he was too on edge to bother. “Let’s go,” he bit out, and started to bring Impala around.

“Wait,” Sam said, reaching out to put a hand on his arm. His mouth was set in a thin line and, in the shadow cast by that stupid hat he’d taken to wearing lately, his eyes gleamed sharply. “Callans won’t last another week without that medication.”

Sam was right. That was why they’d come here in the first place: to save the fifty-odd people living at the Callan family ranch seventy miles behind them. Any or all of those people—people they knew: people Dean had flirted and gotten drunk with—could be dead already, but they’d be dead for sure without the antibiotics. They might die with them as well, of course—there were no guarantees anything they brought back would work—but at some point you just had to cross your fingers, hang on tight, and pray.

Dean had gotten really good at praying lately, a fact that never failed to fill him with an ironic, black humor. He prayed almost daily to a God he finally believed in but hated with a deep, sullen resentment. Because he’d seen too much to doubt anymore, but any deity who let the world turn into a place where people could die from something that had probably started its life as fucking _strep throat_ was a sick, sadistic bastard.

He and Sam hadn’t even been able to go close enough to offer any real assistance: had had to pull up short when they saw the black cloth covering all the windows. It left a sick, burning sensation in Dean’s gut, and he could tell from his brother’s face that Sam didn’t feel much better about it, but they couldn’t risk getting infected themselves and spreading the sickness to the other settlements on their circuit.

Two hundred-odd square miles encompassing seven ranches, five farms and a half dozen mongrel hybrids of the two _(not to mention any lone wanderers they came across)_ , and that circuit was the closest thing to home that Dean could remember. It made certain things sit easier on his shoulders, but laying down roots had its price as well. One death hurt as badly as fifteen had in the old days, and when they’d lost the entire Dandella Farm to a rogue pack of hellhounds, Dean hadn’t been able to bring himself to speak for almost a full month.

“We can’t be everywhere,” Sam had told him softly as they sat by their campfire after a long day of burials _(it had taken three days of blistering, back-cracking work to finish the job, and another two weeks to hunt the pack down and take care of it)_. “We’re doing the best we can.”

If Dean had been speaking, he would have pointed out that their best obviously wasn’t good enough, but he wasn’t, so he didn’t.

One day not long after Dean had remembered how to talk, Sam suggested that maybe they draw their route in a little: that they could better protect one or two places than the couple dozen they were working now. There was no question of trying to condense everyone into a single settlement, of course: they’d learned early on that too much humanity concentrated in one place drew the supernatural in like a plague of locusts.

Dean hadn’t so much as paused as he washed their breakfast pans in the stream they’d camped by. “You want to decide who?” he asked without lifting his head.

Sam hadn’t brought it up again.

So here they were in a tomb of a city that they normally would have given about a fifty-mile wide berth. Cities weren’t just dead places: they were dangerous. Hell, everywhere was dangerous these days, but cities were especially bad.

The damned places were meeting and breeding grounds for all sorts of nasty things, not to mention the homes of outlaw bands of humans. Dean didn’t understand how anyone could stand to live in the hollow shells that struck him as oversized graveyards _(or, when he was feeling particularly morbid, as rotting carcasses)_ , but then again he couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea that anyone would chose to live that way either: stealing what they needed from others like jackals and killing anyone who got in their way.

As though following Dean’s thoughts, Sam asked, “Is it the Jesses?”

Like always, Dean’s habit of naming those bands after the famous outlaws of the Old West didn’t seem quite so amusing when he was faced with the prospect of actually having to deal with them. Humans died easily, but, necessary as it was, that kind of killing left a sour taste in his mouth.

After a moment of consideration, he shook his head. “No. We broke them up pretty good last time we came through. They’re gone.” For now, anyway.

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” Dean answered without hesitating, and didn’t look too closely at where that certainty came from. Something tickled at the back of his mind and he tightened his grip on the reins. “Demons, I think,” he added grudgingly.

Sam’s face went at once worried and smug, which was an interesting expression on him. “And you know that _how_?” he prodded.

Dean resisted the urge to kick Impala in the belly—it wasn’t really her fault—as he dragged her head around and urged her deeper into the city again. “Lucky guess,” he grunted, letting his hand inch toward the Colt at his waist.

It wasn’t a demon killer anymore—no more of those fancy bullets left—but it was valuable just the same because it sometimes worked. Not reliably enough that he and Sam weren’t also carrying crossbows and about a dozen knives apiece, but often enough that Dean hadn’t chucked it. Seemed like the simpler a piece of technology was, the better it worked. If he could get the Colt to fire today, it might slow the demons down long enough for Sam to rattle an exorcism off.

Not that it would save any of the poor bastards the demons had possessed. It had been over a year since an exorcism had left them with a living, breathing person instead of a corpse.

“I don’t suppose either of you knows how many or where?” Sam asked as Halen matched Impala’s stride.

“I don’t suppose you know how to keep your cakehole shut,” Dean snapped, anxious and angry and terrified all at once and hating it. Hating what was happening to him. It wasn’t Sam’s fault any more than it was Impala’s, but Sam should have known enough to shut up about it, so Dean didn’t feel quite so bad about lashing out at him.

“Have I mentioned lately what a joy and a pleasure you are to be around?” Sam asked dryly and then they both tensed at the sound of something falling two streets over.

The demons probably would have waited until they were both dehorsed before making a move, but they’d given themselves away now. They’d want to close in for the kill before Sam and Dean could turn the horses and make a run for it. Not that running was an option.

Dean pulled the Colt from its holster and twisted the reins more tightly around his left hand. Beside him, Sam was unzipping his coat so that he could get at the throwing knives strapped to his chest in two neat, crisscrossing rows.

There was laughter ringing them now—maybe twenty demons, maybe only three: it was difficult to tell with all the echoes. Dean caught their surname on a low, hungry whisper: “Winchester.”

“Nice to be famous,” Sam offered, hefting a blade in one hand.

Dean snorted, but he was grinning. When it came down to it, he always grinned. If he was going out, he was damn well going out with a smile on his face.

“Cowboy up,” he said, and Sam laughed, and then it was on.


End file.
